Maggie was cheeky. I wanted to have fun too. But she couldn’t hear the spirits, only I could. And I heard them only when Splitfoot whispered their answers in my ear.
It took us further than either Maggie or myself ever guessed. Theater performances, stories in the papers, meetings with people paying good money to hear us crack our toes under the table and spell out how their uncle Willy still loved them or that their momma was so proud. Sometimes I got tired of that and asked Mr. Splitfoot to join the proceedings. That was when people learned things from the dead that went beyond any trickery. The name of the child who’d died as a newborn and was buried in an unmarked grave, or the date when a lost husband first saw his wife with her knickers off.
Trouble was, Splitfoot could be unpredictable. Sometimes he didn’t just answer the questions. Sometimes he threw plates against the wall or released odors so fierce they made people sick or growled like a beast that had leapt out of the walls.
But it was different in the White House. It was like he was there for you, Mrs. Pierce, as much as he was there for me.
I’m very sorry for what happened. Your lost sons. My failure to bring you into communication with Bennie.
Yet I am left hopeful in this one respect—ever since that night in your room, Splitfoot has not returned to me. I have neither seen him nor heard his voice. Perhaps I have rid myself of this hellish companion for good.
Wishing you peace,
Kate
It left Jane shaking. The last paragraph more than the rest of it. What it meant for her.
Along with the memory of her father it returned.
* * *
After little John’s passing, Jesse Appleton’s physical decline was a spectacle the entire college couldn’t turn its eyes from. The president’s once stiff-backed strides across the quad crumpled into arthritic shuffles within the space of months. It was like watching a walking suicide.
When he took to his bed one afternoon for a “good sleep” he never left it again. He asked to speak with each of his children. They came to him one at a time, closing the door behind them. Jane last. As she waited her turn, she couldn’t guess if this position of being her father’s final visitor was an honor or a punishment. What if he succumbed before she had a chance to sit in the chair by the bed and say whatever needed to be said? She feared what her father might share with her more than the prospect of her failure to provide any comfort.
Mary came out of the bedroom in tears just as all her siblings had. It made Jane resolve to be the only one who left dry-eyed when she exited. Brave Jane. It was important that her anguish be understood as greater than all others so that it could be seen as being endured with the greatest forbearance.
Her mother squeezed Jane’s shoulder harder than necessary. Every one of her touches was harder than necessary. To Jane it seemed that her mother was always trying to wake her from a troubled dream.
“He’s waiting,” Elizabeth said, an unmistakable alarm stretching her features. Jane took it to be her mother’s apprehension at losing her husband. But as she closed the bedroom door behind her she saw it as dread of something about Jane herself.
“Come here.”
Jane’s father was thin as a birch branch, but his voice arrived from a greater distance than the bed. It seemed that he was speaking from the woods that surrounded town, already drawing back into its leaves and soil.
She sat on the hard pine chair. It was difficult to look directly at him for any length of time. She was unsettled by his appearance and lonely at the idea that she would soon be without him. What upset her most was the prospect that he was about to say something that would reshape her, put her in a condition beyond her capacities to hide or repair.
“Are you comfortable?” she asked.
“I’m cold. And full of sleep. Yet these are only God’s hands showing the way home.”
She tried to imagine where her father was going. A frigid place where one felt ill and sleepy for eternity. She didn’t think it sounded welcoming at all.
“I will miss you, Father.”
“I will miss you too. But I will take condolence in my memory of you, as I hope you will take condolence in your thoughts of me.”
Jesse Appleton was a kind man, if not warm, and these words were the most tender he’d ever spoken to Jane. She leaned back in the chair, and it cracked as if in amplification of the breaking inside of her.
The bedsheet moved. A rolling mound coming up and pushing through to the air. Her father’s hand. Its fingers flexing with invitation. Jane placed her hand in his palm and the fingers closed around it.
“It’s a paradox, isn’t it?” he said. “Especially for those like us.…”
His voice trailed off, as if he expected Jane to finish his thought for him. But which thought? What was the paradox? Why was it one with special meaning for the two of them?
“Our time here is so unbearably long, and yet so short there isn’t opportunity to say what we need to,” he went on. “I have been a poor father in this respect, and I’m sorry for that. But here we are. Our last words. And you are my only child whom I wish to hear those words from, instead of you to hear them from me.”
He stared at her from the sweat-soaked pit of his pillow with a look of expectation she thought must be a misreading, a side effect of his pain.
“My only words are that I love you, Daddy.”
“Yes. Yes,” he said, blinking. “What else is there you need to tell me, my daughter? We aren’t members of the Roman faith, but think of this room as a confessional. A chance for forgiveness, and also for counsel. For both of us, I hope.”
“Is there something you wish me to speak about?”
His hand tightened on hers.
“Please don’t lie to me,” he said.
“No, sir.”
“Don’t call me that!”
“I’m sorry. I—”
“Don’t call me what you already call another!”
He knew. Sir. She heard him say it without him saying it.
He knew she was the one to take the pendulum game from his desk, that she played with it the way he had also done himself, that someone had come to her, claimed a small but essential part of her as it had claimed him. She understood exactly. They both did.
“I don’t understand, Daddy,” she said.
His face softened. This time it wasn’t another increment in the gradual disappearing act of his passing but a show of sympathy. She was aware that her father loved her. But in this instant she grasped how much he did, how unique this love was for her and only her.
“I’m worried for you, Jane. Desperately so,” he said, and eased his grasp of her hand without letting it go. “I know a little of what you know. About the—otherness. But there are only the two of us who share this knowledge. We’re curious kitties, aren’t we? Devoted to God but also devoted to knowing what he keeps from us.”
Her father was speaking to her in the way of a sermon. Indirectly, seriously. In church, this kind of communication bored her. But now she not only comprehended what was being said, she was also riveted by it.
“Who did you lose, father?”
He winced. It was as if her question was the poke of a needle to his back.
“I tried to bring back someone who’d passed on a long time ago,” he answered. “Someone who hurt me when I was a boy.”